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More and more details emerge about the Kremlin’s involvement in the uprising in Ukraine. The Glazyev Tapes show how deep that involvement was. Sergey Glazyev, advisor of Putin, called for popular uprisings to create the preconditions for the puppet state of Novorossia. This must have consequences for Minsk.

I found some interesting numbersin one of the past waves of the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) Omnibus survey.

In the September 2015 wave (specifically from September 9 to September 24, for anyone wanting that level of detail), KIIS asked more than 2,000 Ukrainians in face-to-face interviews:

Would you like to see your oblast secede from Ukraine and become an independent state?

Would you like to see your oblast secede from Ukraine and join another state?

KIIS interviewed in all Ukrainian-government controlled areas of Ukraine; they didn’t interview in Crimea or in the “LNR,” though theydid interview in the “DNR” (they no longer do). For the overall Ukraine and regional numbers I’m only including Ukrainian government-controlled areas – I talk about the “DNR” numbers towards the end of this piece.

The resounding answer to both thesequestions? No – fewer than 2% of Ukrainians are interested in…

#5OclockTalk has started. Our first guest Isaac Webb is an American journalist who lived in Kyiv from 2013 to 2014 and then moved back this summer. Ian Bateson is finding out what else Isaac is doing here.

Perhaps, Europeans should be less worried about the direction of U.S. foreign policies under Trump than about the question how far Washington will be able to remain an effective geopolitical actor, at all. Trump’s victory’s main effect on international relations might be the U.S.’s reduced availability to the conduct of foreign affairs. The main repercussion of Trump’s surprising triumph may be that Washington will be too much consumed with internal conflicts to be as active in world politics as it used to be. Trump will have to rule against the background of a strong dislike of millions of Americans for him and his policies, and the so far unpredictable ways in which this dislike will express itself. (One cannot even exclude race riots or other turmoil.)

While it is unclear what this means for the functioning of the U.S. governmental apparatus including the military, it seems already clear that much of U.S. mass media, academia, arts scene and civil society will either only conditionally support or even actively fight Trump in the coming months and years. Even civil servants may find it difficult to properly do their job under President Trump, if he rules as erratic as his campaign behavior suggests he may. The main issue arising from this may not be zigzags in Washington’s foreign behavior, but rather its partial plain absence on the world political scenery during periods of domestic political infighting.

That means that the members and institutions of the European Union as well as other pro-Western countries and international organizations will probably have to take care much more of things than they have been used to do so far — as long as the US will be busy sorting out itself during the next four years (if no impeachment happens before).